New fountains with flames coming to Longwood Gardens

The Main Fountain Garden at Longwood Gardens is a muddy mess these days.

Great ruts of wheelprints gash the wet dirt. Pools of water collect in oozy lakes. Planks laid on the ground allow teetering passage for those without boots or waders. Shrieking beeps of backing construction machines pierce the air.

And it all looks just the way it's supposed to.

"It's not too often that you get to see Versailles being built," Paul B. Redman, Longwood's executive director, said as he took it all in from a high terrace in front of the Longwood Conservatory. "It will be a very Parisian park."

Sprawling across nearly 1,000 rolling acres in Kennett Square in Chester County, Longwood Gardens is midway through a massive $90 million restoration and construction project - the largest capital project in its history - and it shows, like a careless slip.

But when it is finished, about a year from now, the critical five-acre Main Fountain Garden, designed by businessman and philanthropist Pierre S. du Pont for his estate, promises to be both a powerful restatement of the past and a showy display for the future.

The restoration will resurrect many nonfunctional elements of du Pont's 1931 design, returning accessibility to areas that have been off-limits for years, recapturing the wonder of the original, which was inspired by du Pont's love of Italian and French water gardens.

The whole south garden wall, with its balustrades, loggia, carved fountains, and walkways - augmented by a new rock grotto "for contemplation" - will be accessible to visitors for the first time in a quarter-century.

The restoration project is a prime piece of Longwood's long-range master plan, which is focused, in part, on an effort to "reverse the eroding legacy" of du Pont's vision, said Redman.

"The south wall, which we're completely restoring now, when we shut down the garden in November 2014 [at the onset of construction], it had not worked for 26 years. It looked like a Roman ruin."

About 4,000 pieces of carved Italian limestone - parts of fountains, basins, and decorative elements - were removed from the garden last year, separately crated, marked via computer tags, and taken off-site for cleaning and repairs. Those pieces of limestone, many bearing carvings by Italian craftsmen, are now being returned and reinstalled.

The guts of the garden - miles of pipes that will move more than 300,000 gallons of water around 380 fountains - are being completely replaced and tucked underground into newly built, easily accessible concrete tunnels.

No longer, when a pipe bursts, will backhoes rumble in to dig up plants and landscaping for repairs.

Tunnels will house all utility infrastructure - all pipes, cables, and wires, including connecting lines for the garden's new surround sound audio feature.

Construction of the 12-by-12-foot tunnels, which run underground for about a quarter-mile, is complete.

When the fountains are fully operational, new technology will become very public, with patterned water displays filling the air. There will be weave jets, for instance, which Redman likened to projecting basket designs.

The garden's centerpiece jet will propel water 175 feet into the air, about 50 feet higher than in the past. Other jets will facilitate a mixture of water and propane.

"It's a flame feature," said Redman. "The propane is ignited and comes out on top of the water. We'll have 30 of those, the largest installation in the world."

Some of these jets are already installed. More are coming.

In large, 60-foot-round basins, constructed for the lower garden area, nozzles of all kinds will provide endlessly varied water patterns.

"The new high technology - spring nozzles, moving nozzles, air-powered nozzles, lighted nozzles - is really going to make this dance and come alive," said Casey McCabe, project manager for Bancroft Construction Co., which is working the site.

The main part of the project still to be completed is restoration of the 40,000-square-foot pump house. After that, the earth across five acres can be built up and landscaping can begin.

Rows of lindens will form allées around the core of the garden, boxwood hedges will wrap central fountain structures, and visitors will be able to stroll through the entire area.

All of this work, mud notwithstanding, is moving at a steady clip, completely self-financed.

Longwood Gardens joined with the Longwood Foundation, Pierre and Alice du Pont's charitable unit, to pay for it all. With combined assets of about $1.4 billion, the two nonprofits are shouldering all construction costs.

"We have the resources to take care of what we do here," said Redman. "But we have to be very entrepreneurial in how we approach our business."

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